Case Study

TCS consolidates document production services for a large professional services firm

TCS’ client, a global professional services firm, sought a solution that would enable better branding compliance and offer demand scalability of client documentation deliverables, along with fast response times and high customer satisfaction. We partnered with the firm and re-engineered the delivery model to address these requirements through standardized production methods and processes, as well as staffing flexibility.

The Customer: TCS’ client is one of the largest accounting and consulting firms in the world and provides a range of professional, industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services. The firm counts a majority of the world’s largest companies among its clients.

Business Challenge: For leading professional services firms like TCS’ client, high-quality documentation deliverables are a vital and integral part of its services to its customers; the deliverables are also significant contributors to customer satisfaction and brand image.

However, our client’s existing document support services were limited and restricted to certain regional offices and business hours, resulting in long lead times. Consequently, the firm’s key front-office employees and client service staff had to carry out administrative tasks such as branding and formatting of documents, along with their core responsibilities. In addition, the firm’s branding guidelines were not federated across its regional offices, resulting in inconsistencies in client deliverables. Lastly, there was a lack of uniform metrics and no central repository for reusable documents.

The firm realized that it required a more reliable solution to address its needs and sought our help to manage its document production process.

TCS’ Solution: We took over the firm’s in-house document production services and re-engineered the delivery model to provide 24/7 coverage for optimal support and quick turnaround. We defined standardized operating procedures for the execution of all deliverables from simple formatting and designing of documents (to the point where further textual edits can easily be made by the requestor) to branding and formatting for financial statements.

We developed forecasting and capacity planning tools to help the firm manage its busy season volumes and automated spreadsheet solutions to reduce iterations and the manual effort previously needed to produce consistent and correct reports. In addition, we created a new reusable diagram bank to reduce duplication of efforts. We also introduced a fast track service lane for the quick turnaround of urgent documents.

Benefits: We continue to manage the document production of the firm, providing consistent and standardized services to the firm as a whole and to all partners and staff. We have delivered well on key metrics such as turnaround time and quality.

By engaging experts with similar skill sets offshore, we have helped the firm optimize costs.

The automated spreadsheet-macros solution has reduced iterations of financial statements by 30%.

The high productivity, with accountability for quality, has resulted in customer satisfaction scores of over 90%.

Additionally, the administrative tasks performed by the firm’s client service staff have reduced in volume, and their utilization on business-related tasks has increased by at least 20%.

Since 2010, the savings gained by the firm from productivity benefits and continuous improvements has been $4.2M. Having derived substantial benefits from the success of this initiative in the US, the firm decided to replicate the same for its UK network firm, where we have been providing additional creative document design services with synergies of scale.